Page 111 - The First Fifty Years

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ODDMENTS 105

research process, Research Editors assigned to professional articles
for the March issue are supervising candidates and interested AE’s
in prescreening the articles for ‘obscure’ sources. The goal is to
determine at an early stage in the editorial process what sources
are unavailable to us and therefore need to be requested from the
author. . . . Hopefully this type of front-end evaluation will preclude
some of the last-minute [problems] we have encountered locating
sources. . . .” Obscure sources in a law review article necessitating
increased time, toil, and trouble? Certainly memories any HLR
alum can relate to!

Texas Barflies. The talents of at least one of the Review’s
Decade 3 authors apparently went well beyond drafting heavily
cited law review articles and influential judicial opinions. The Texas
Barflies, led by U.S. District Court Judge David Hittner, along with
Law Center Professor David Crump, Bracewell & Patterson partner
Max Addison, and Baker Botts partner Diana Marshall performed
at HLR’s spring banquet in 1987 to a packed house at the old
Houston Club’s Texas Room.

Clearly (En)titled. As an ever larger proportion of nationally
recognized scholarship filled the pages of HLR in Decade 3, so too
did increasingly clever titles. But two titles stood above the rest.
The award for best article title of the decade is a tie between
Stewart Macaulay, Bambi Meets Godzilla: Reflections on Contracts
Scholarship and Teaching vs. State Unfair and Deceptive Trade
Practices and Consumer Protection, 26 HOUS. L. REV. 575 (1989),
and Catherine E. Blackburn, The Therapeutic Orgy and the Right to
Rot Collide: The Right to Refuse Antipsychotic Drugs under State
Law, 27 HOUS. L. REV. 447 (1990). Bambi? Godzilla? Stoned?
Orgies? Decade 3 Gone Wild! Ahem . . . .

Darned Right We’re Counting. Continuing one of its best
traditions, three out of the first four Editors in Chief during the
period covered here were women. Wait for it . . . Thus, at the end of
Houston Law Review’s third decade, the score stood (with lifetime
batting averages in parentheses for the benefit of Red Sox Nation):
HLR South, 8 for 30 (.267), HLR North, 2 for 100 (.020)—the policy
of the latter publication being, apparently, to select/appoint a woman
as President at least every half century, qualifications permitting.